However because CEBIT attracts a broad range of attendees the conference sessions were a mixture of beginner, medium and advanced information. I liked this because it introduced some topics eg: online advertising, email marketing and podcasting which aren’t usually covered at SEO conferences.

Each day, Hitwise provides insights on how 3 million Australian Internet users interact with more than 1 million websites, across 165+ industries.

This meant Gavin’s talk was full of interesting factoids and used case studies to effectively make his points. Make note of this other speakers, the audience wants case studies with real data, not made up guesstimates.

SEO Basics are important – yet many sites still don’t cover the basic requirements of kw research, quality content, search engine friendly site and link building. Without these other SEO work won’t achieve much.

Keyword (KW) should be researched – don’t just use company jargon and guess work

KW tools are USA centric and not very accurate – use them as a rough guide

Tips from me: Mine your internal site search logs and inbound traffic referrers URL’s from site analytics for keywords that are driving traffic for you

Online writing – people are skimmers and scanners – grab their attention above the fold, use H1-H6, lists and bold to break up the text

Anchor text for links should be about that pages content, not “click here”. Tips from me: anchor text should make sense out of context eg: if all you saw was link text you’d know what the link target was.

Beware of outsourced copy writers – get examples of their work to judge SEO writing skills, writing for web != writing for brochures

Jeremy talked about Link Building. He’s a good speaker: loud and clear, moves around the stage, uses bullet points, graphics and large text for his Power point presentation.

Link quality is important – links from bad sites can damage your rank

1 good quality reutable link = Good vs 10 poor quality links = Bad

Competitors – level of competition in your industry = how hard it is to rank. eg: Small independent supermarket site hard to compete with Woolworths site

Remove site constraints – taking forever to change copy, forbidding people to link to your site etc, obsession with branding and marketing speak instead of content that your customers actually want….

External Links to your Site

Indicators of link importance and quality from a site – Link from old established domain=Good, quality content surrounding outbound links=Good, text links=Good, fewer outbound links on page=Good, site in same industry as you=Good, Link above fold=Good, Link from Yahoo Directory and DMOZ=Good, Links from your blog, social media and forum profiles=Good

Image link=Mediocre, Lots of links on page=Bad, Same anchor text for all inbound links to your site=Bad, Unnaturally fast growth of links to your site=Bad

Outbound Links from your Site

Link to good quality sites and experts=Good, Link to sites in your industry aka Neighbourhood=Good.

Internal Links to other pages on your Site: Link to pages you want to rank highly in navigation links etc

Mick gave an entertaining overview of how to use new rich media formats to improve engagement by ad viewers within the ad itself rather than clicking through to another page, is the CTR dead as an ad measurement?

CTR for ads: 2005=0.5%, 2006=0.3%, 2007=below 0.2%. Anyway 6% of the online audience generate 50% of the clicks so the CTR is increasingly becoming irrelevant

Solution: Innovate – provide more content in the ad unit eg: booking availability engine for a hotel ad. if the ad is relevant and well designed it increases engagement by viewers and builds brands without needing clickthroughs to a landing page

These video examples Mick showed us of campaigns Eyeblaster has run for clients are really great examples of what can be done to engage ad viewersMr Bean movie, Nivea lotion for men.

Don’t let graphics designers use small size 6/8 fonts. Lots of people young and old can’t read them easily

Test different email formatting styles on a 10% section of your list. eg: 1/3rd get design A, 1/3rd get design B, 1/3rd get design C. Send the 90% rest of your list the design which converted best out of A, B and C

Test which times of the day/week convert best. For many email lists Tues-Thurs is best, mid-morning beats first thing in the morning etc. But test on your list as your demographic may vary from this.

Learn about people who signup for emails and customise communication to give them what they want eg: if they ask for weekly emails, TXT format, list of specials give them exactly that. Use a survey to get this data, offer a prize for random person who answers the survey.

Once you establish a common ground with a person and communicate with them not at them they’ll be happy to read your emails and do business with you

Search engines = reputation engines. If your brand doesn’t rank for its own name reputation will be lowered

Keep an eye on the top 20 results for key brands and your company name. Having as many of your own pages ranking well in the top 20 results is a good defensive strategy in case bad news breaks about your company because there are fewer SERPs spots for that bad news to be listed in.

In some of the projects I work on I see a bigger portion of traffic coming from SE’s. It could be a signal that there is still massive room for improvement around PPC/SEO for a lot of Australian businesses.

Also I think Hitwise data is good but I wonder if there is potentially a demographic skew due to the ISP data not including Optus and Bigpond?

Anyway that’s my 2 cents….

EDITOR: I found the 26% statistic interesting as well, I guess an average site get most of its traffic from bookmarks, type ins links from other sites etc compared to blogs like mine which gets over 85% of traffic from search engines

Also, I’ve seen the Hitwise stats for my blog and while they’re pretty accurate some of the top keywords that I know drive traffic to the site were not in their report

The tip about using mis-spellings is spot on. I mis-spelled a couple of words on my posts, (what can I say, I us up really late working) and it ranked in the SERPs for that word. Generated a good bit of traffic.